Gaming: Breaking Sonic Racing: Crossworlds Review

Heaps of fun and plenty chaotic, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is the closest we've ever gotten to Mario Kart on PC… for better and worse.

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What is it? An all-out Sonic kart racer ready to rival the Italian plumber's own offering

Reviewed on: Nvidia GeForce RTX3070, AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT, 32GB RAM

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is so messy and frustrating that I sometimes question why I like it so much. Items are horribly balanced, and online matches are rife with players sandbagging and hoarding all the good items until the final stretch—that is, if you can even get to that point before the game throws an error at you and boots you back to the lobby.

For a game that feels so heavily centred around its online competitive scene, it should be a dealbreaker. But Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds hoists itself up with some of the cleanest, most robust kart racing I've seen on PC, tracks that leave a ton of room for experimentation and optimisation, vehicle customisation I could only dream of in other mascot-centric kart racers, and an abundance of unserious trash talk that feels so on-brand for the Sonic cast (Big: "You look tense, buddy. Wanna go fishing after this?" Shadow: "No." Excellent. No notes.)

It's certainly a game propped up by three decades of history: A roster made up of your go-to franchise mascots paired with lesser-seen folk like Zazz, Vector, and even Frontiers' Sage. Levels from the likes of Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Unleashed have been given the "what if a bunch of cars and hoverboards were whizzing through this place?" treatment, and tracks from Sonic's older races are back in slightly altered forms, too.

It's basically a Sonic-themed who's-who, with a dizzying number of easter eggs that would go right over the head of a basic bitch Sonic fan like myself (I just really like Shadow the Hedgehog), but will have longtime blue blur nerds going wild for it.

Even as someone who can't deeply appreciate every wink-wink-nudge-nudge, I absolutely loved CrossWorlds' tracks. I was expecting a linearity similar to Mario Kart, but was instead met with a multitude of off-road paths, verticality, and not-so-obvious shortcuts that afford loads of different ways to experiment and shave precious seconds off each lap time.

There's a chaos in the constant-shifting nature of

Source: PC Gamer